The present invention refers to a tipping conveyor element for a continuous piece goods conveyor generally referred to as a tipping bucket conveyor for short. Its driven barrow tram consists mainly of a number of conveying elements connected flexibly with each other. At their upper end-section these elements each have a dish-shaped supporting plate, whose edge sections (=first supporting plate sections) running in the conveying direction are each (i.e. on both sides of the symmetric line) bent or curved upwards in relation to the section (=second supporting plate sections) adjacent to this section toward the inside (=i.e. toward the middle).
Such tipping bucket conveyors are used today particularly as sorters for packet or luggage distributing facilities, for example.
The piece goods are fed to the sorter at at least one feed point (but often at several feed points) manually or preferably with appropriate feeding devices in such a way that they are each placed on the supporting surface of a conveying element. In the process, the barrow tram generally circulates on a horizontal plane, but it can also run at an incline or vertically, in which case precautions are taken that the piece goods do not unintentionally slide down from the supporting surfaces.
The essential task of a sorter consists of calculatedly feeding each of the piece goods to one of several feed stations arranged laterally to the conveyor belt in order to sort them according to determined criteria. For postal packages, for example, this can be sorting by zip code or, in the case of a sorter deployed at an airport, sorting of pieces of checked luggage according to flight destination, a certain flight number or the like.
We are familiar with a tipping conveyor system from DE-OS 14 31 736 the conveyor elements of which have a level, horizontal supporting plate with an accordingly designed supporting surface. Such conveyor elements are completely inappropriate for many types of piece goods, particularly (but not exclusively) when considering piece goods such as cylindrical rolls of drawings or the like which, after being fed onto a tipping conveyor element with level, horizontal supporting plate or surface, would roll off of the conveyor element.
Thus, we are already familiar with dish-shaped tipping conveyor elements (see DE-AS 2 037 380, for example) whose bottom forming the actual supporting surface is level only in the middle area (and in the normal conveyor position--i.e. not in the tipping position --horizontal), while the adjacent edge sections on both sides are curved upward at an angle of just a few degrees.
These previously known conveyor elements are also inappropriate for sure handling of piece goods such as cylindrical rolls of drawings, for example, because they have high, flange-like ridges at both of their edges running crosswise to the conveyor direction in such a way that there is the same problem if the rolls of drawings or the like are longer than the measured length of a conveyor element in conveyor direction.
There are therefore dish-shaped tipping conveyor elements of a similar type (see DE-OS 1 431 845, for example) that have no such edge ridge running crosswise to the conveyor direction. But with these known conveyor elements as well, sure handling of rolls of drawings or the like is still not possible because the incline of the two supporting plate sections designed symmetrically to the longitudinal center line is only a few degrees, as is the case for the conveyor elements according to DE 30 50 102 Al.
A (tipping) conveyor element of the type described at the beginning is known from DE-PS 36 02 861 in which the edge sections running in conveyor direction (first supporting plate sections) are each curved upward in relation to the adjacent second supporting plate section connected inward or toward the middle. In this arrangement, in a manner similar to that of the conveyor element according to the already mentioned DE-AS 2 037 380, the level second supporting plate section runs horizontally in the (not tipped) conveying mode, but there are no high edge ridges at the conveyor element edges running crosswise to the conveyor direction.
It has been shown that the tipping conveyor element known from DE-PS 36 02 861 is far superior to the other previously described arrangements in terms of the problem being discussed at this point, but this previously known conveyor element still does not solve this problem satisfactorily.
Until now, with sorters equipped with such conveyor elements and, for example, deployed in postal package distributing facilities, the occurring rolls of drawings or the like were sorted manually or were laid by hand crosswise onto such a dish-shaped tipping conveyor element. Since such rolls of drawings or the like are usually considerably longer than the width of the supporting plate of the conveyor elements, side walls, light-barrier mountings and the like regularly had a highly disruptive effect on the trip of such rolls or the like to their destination. Furthermore, an undefined center of gravity evidently led to similar problems as those found with the above-mentioned dish-shaped tipping conveyor elements with high edge ridges.
When feeding manually, piece goods like rolls of drawings or the like were laid parallel to the longitudinal direction (in conveyor direction) of a tipping conveyor element. Even then, although the above-mentioned difficulties were considerably reduced, there was still no relatively short-term steadying (more precisely a steadying of the fed piece good of the type in question on a short stretch) because of the only slightly curved dish incline. This disturbed the operation just as before in an unacceptable (sometimes critical) manner.